Cloud storage and services provider OpenStack has launched an iPad app to boost clients tools. Based on the Rackspace Cloud Pro iPad app, the new OpenStack iPad app presents a mobile access point for managing certain aspects of clients’ accounts (read more about Rackspace's backing of OpenStack here). The OpenStack iPad app is a front-end project for clients, allowing them to receive updates on the status of your servers, the ability to ping your compute nodes from various global locations, and emailing files from your OpenStack Object Storage. OpenStack explains the app’s integration with Chef and the Opscode Platform, noting “Our newest feature, made possible by working with people from Opscode, is integration with Chef

Rackspace may have a lot going on right now—it’s recently launched a massive cloud initiative called OpenStack, for one. To say that Rackspace is growing out its verticals is an understatement, especially as cloud tools for the enterprise gain in usability, security and budgeting appeal. While the OpenStack release helped boost Rackspace’s sales nearly 24% in this year’s second quarter, the company also has time to share some stats around its cloud-based services. Email, to be exact. Rackspace’s sense of humor shines through with these report numbers around email activity. Looks like Michigan has the healthiest work hours (you’d never know I was born and raised there). Email Hosting

The news continues to flow from OSCON here in Portland.  After Rackspace dropped a bombshell with their OpenStack announcement Sunday night, managed services and cloud provider OpSource is taking the wraps off of their partner program they have been putting together over the past couple of quarters. We have covered OpSource several times in the past as they have been rapidly been advancing their cloud offering after just releasing it late last year.  The company which is no stranger to the managed service space, being a leader in SaaS platform management since their inception, started as most with pay-as-you-go compute with strong access control and metering options, then adding storage later with full encryption in-transit, and

Last night, timed with the opening day of OSCON, hosting and managed service provider Rackspace, along with NASA and other organizations, launched the OpenStack project.  The project aims to create and foster a 100%, Apache 2.0 license backed, Cloud Computing stack that can be used by all. It did not take too long for the news to spread around blogs and twitter, and from the responses people are having it is seeming as if the Cloud Computing landscape has completely changed over night.  “NO MORE LOCK-IN” is the chant around the web.. It’s definitely the PR focal point of the announcement.  On the surface, and in the short-term, what we have is yet another choice for an IaaS platform, and out of the gate it has a co

At SiliconANGLE, one of the lesser publicized benefits for membership we have here is that we offer cloud-based blog hosting on our custom infrastructure (powered by our partner Rackspace, of course).  It’s something we’ve been testing to great success in private alpha for close to six months now, and it’s become an easier and easier pitch as interest in the cloud has grown in the last several months. Still, it’s difficult to get folks to move what they view as mission critical operations to what can seem like foreign deployment environments, and wrapping your head around cloud services at the IT level can be pretty foreign.  A lot of the confusion around what it takes to deploy on the cloud has been fueled by the Amazo

Rackspace is partnering with FathomDB, a relational database-as-a-service (DaaS) company. FathomDB is a service that will make the day-to-day operations of running a database much simpler, allowing you to focus on higher end tasks of your application. This partnership is an extension of Rackspace’s ecosystem buildout (under Cloud Tools site), and at the same time answers Amazon's RDS announcement from last month. [Editor’s Note: Michelle Greer has a post up on her blog over at Rackspace. –jf] Amazon move with RDS is a short term patch to help them keep their position in the market. Now Rackspace is in the game with more tools for "MySql Cloud Ready" service with FathomDB - or as Fathom says DaaS. Rackspace now has an off

A major executive hire was made today, as Rackspace today brought on a new COO in ex-eBay veep Mark Roenigk. Roenigk will be reporting to Rackspace president and CEO Lanham Napier, and has been tasked with helping to build up the “computing platform on which all our services run,” according to Napier. Roenigk has a long history at other companies, coming from an engineering background, starting at companies like Compaq and Microsoft.  During his time at Microsoft, he fast-tracked his rise to the ranks of senior management from 1995 to 2004, when he left to join Intuit as the vice president of “Supply Chain Operations.” Based on his track record and the long laundry list of projects he’s worked on at various corporate giant

In recent weeks, we’ve heard a ton of news about Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010. Most corporations use SharePoint for collaboration on a single platform through extranets and the Internet. Revising the toolset, as Microsoft does with the new SharePoint 2010, means major changes in how people work together. That’s why we got in touch with AvePoint, an international infrastructure management company based in Jersey City, N.J., to talk to us about SharePoint. AvePoint is one of the leading vendors making SharePoint tools for users spread around the world. Chris Foreman, vice president of Enterprise Sales, talks to us in this building43 video about what his firm is doing to prepare its more than 5,000 customers for SharePoint 2010. O

I recently had lunch at Max’s in Menlo Park with Michael Crandell, the CEO of Rightscale (the cloud services manager company), to talk about trends and observations in cloud computing.  You can hear the background noise at Max’s (great desserts at Max’s). Here are my notes from the meeting: Rightscale has a unique perspective in that it is a leader in the cloud space. Of the entire Amazon EC2 market Rightscale has majority share and Rightscale is a top partner with Rackspace Cloud as well as being utilized in private cloud deployments. Amazon and Rackspace are the leaders infrastructure cloud and Rightscale lives on those infrastructure APIs like Amazon and Rackspace. Download the MP3 of the lunch meeting here or play it via

The last few days, due to the holidays, we’ve been posting light on the main blog.  This has lead to somewhat of a vacuum in our addiction to blogging, so naturally we’ve been satisfying our urge to blog by hanging out over on the /SAbackchan. Here’s some of our topics of conversation. The threads are all still live – feel free to join in. Yahoo Exec Changes “Some solid reporting from Kara Swisher on changes at Yahoo. The story is worth reading if you’re into what Yahoo is doing. Yahoo has content and audience but no mobile and search. My open question is where is the growth strategy? Yahoo can only “milk that content & audience cow for so long” before it implodes or gets cannibalized by  competitors or new